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the future of the internet and how to stop it by jonathan zittrain

August 7, 2008 – 4:49 pm by caleb

In a comment on Anne-Marie’s “secret library books” post last week I mentioned that I had started reading The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it by Jonathan Zittrain. I’m not sure it turned out to be a secret library book or not, but there is much to interest librarians.

Zittrain describes something as generative if it “fosters innovation and disruption”. Something non-generative is “sterile”, and in the context of the internet, a “tethered” device has software and services bound to the hardware. A personal computer is generative because you can reprogram it. An iPhone is not, as Zittrain points out often on his book-related blog.

Generativity on the internet is add odds with our culture and economy because of it’s disruptiveness: spam, viruses, copyright infringement, the distribution of child pornography and the proliferation of cheap cameras and microphones that infringe on our privacy all seem like super-villains in the story of the Internet. More often than not, institutional response to these is to restrict the internet’s generativity by restricting who can do what with which device. Zittrain argues that limiting generativity limits innovation.

It is curious that Zittrain doesn’t add that restricting generativity is just as damaging to information as it is to innovation. Luke Rosenberger is a systems and reference librarian I know from the days when my library contracted a company he worked for. He recently wrote that his university’s lockdown of peer-to-peer internet traffic also managed to block websites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. Extending the rationale of an executive order from Texas governor Rick Perry, the university said the sites were blocked because of the “potential risk” of sharing files.

Zittrain is Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, visiting professor at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and co-editor of Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering. He is certainly aware of the limitations on speech and intellectual freedom that a “sterile” internet imposes.

The implicit argument throughout the book is that generativity is basically good and that social action will do more to combat disruptive technologies and behaviors than regulation will. Reminiscent of Lawrence Lessig’s statement in Code (version 2.0) that the internet has no inherent qualities, Zittrain says that the Internet is what it is because we made it that way. Along with everything else on the internet, disruptions like spam and viruses are not technical in nature but born of human action. He suggests we find solutions that are “light on law”.

Zittrain’s principal model for social action to support innovation without succumbing to disruption in a generative space is Wikipedia. A very simple editing process and an inclusive community has birthed a collective ethos among Wikipedians, and that is usually enough to stop vandalism, slander, copyright infringement and political grandstanding.

…Wikipedia has come to stand for the idea that involvement of people in the information they read - whether to fix a typographical error or to join a debate over its veracity or completeness - is an important end itself…

Libraries should take note that we don’t land completely on the side of the Justice League when it comes to internet generativity. I can think of at least two de-generative capers perpetrated by libraries: our brief embrace of DRM-laden downloadable audiobooks and the lack of media in multiple formats (MP3-CD, for example). Both of these limit the generativity of library materials, and ergo, of libraries as well.

Zittrain notes only that locked-down public computers are not the generative devices that open PCs with unfettered internet connections are. Even when we provide patrons with complete access to the internet, we give them little opportunity to change it.

My first job that required an MLS included changing PC BIOS settings so that computers couldn’t be booted from the disk drive. Of course, nowadays you can just run a Linux emulator from your USB flash drive, so I imagine student workers are in charge of the F1 key today.

Surely, libraries are not out to sterilize generativity. Ultimately it is cheaper to restrict public computing than to support it unconditionally, and the common strategy of wiping a hard drive in between uses allows us to preserve our role as guardians of our patrons’ privacy.

But even then, Zittrain might argue, we are guardians only of “Privacy 1.0″. In chapter 9’s case study, “Meeting the Risks of Generativity: Privacy 2.0″, Zittrain touches on the notion that generational differences in attitudes towards privacy, but really focuses on the idea that cheap, ubiquitous and mashup-able cameras muddle what is public and what is private. Texas experimented with crowdsourcing border control, facial recognition technology promises to tell surveillance cameras who they are pointed at, and anyone with a cameraphone can post an image or film of another’s bad behavior.

Our hero offers us some hope and a number of strategies, but ultimately warns us that the younger, seemingly privacy-unconscious generation may have gotten it right. Zittrain says that “privacy is about establishing a locus which we can call our own without undue intervention or interruption - a place where we can vest our identities”. Faced with only the reality of a hyper-generative space in which to do this, “MySpace pages, blogs, and similar online outposts can be repositories for our identities for which personal control, not secrecy, is the touchstone.”

I wish I could be a little more critical in this review. I found some nits to pick (am I the only one who thinks eBay’s reputation system is a sham?), but even if it’s a little dry and gloomy, the book is accessible and well-argued, and I learned a whole bunch. Zittrain even goes so far as to take his own advice. The entire text is available online through a creative-commons-licensed interactive web version of the book.